Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic, and deeply influential, notion of the disaster – a term Blanchot famously refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeannette Winterson and Maggie Gee, Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the space of the imagination, as the place where some conception (ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges. These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding of critical events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible.

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Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University, London, Canada. His previous publications include Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience (Wayne State UP, 2015), Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2011), Samuel Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008), and Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (University Press of Florida, 2001).